The Feminist Majority and NOW

On the third floor of the Bubble Factory, the Feminist Majority's president, Eleanor Smeal, was in the kitchen. When she had finished up the dishes from the election eve meeting, she walked out onto the open floor that had been transformed into an election day war room. It was a classy war room, with large flower bouquets atop television sets tuned to CNN, computer printouts on the walls, and a bag of gourmet lemon drops spilling out onto one of the tables.

By the end of the day Smeal and Katherine Spillar would be forced to concede that the Feminist Majority and NOW had failed to turn Proposition 209 into a rallying point for white women: 58 percent of white women (compared with 66 percent of white men) had supported Proposition 209, according to the Voter News Service Poll.^[34]

The Voter News Service Poll differed slightly with the Los Angeles Times poll in finding that Proposition 209 was supported by 52 percent of all women and rejected by 48 percent. The margin of error in both polls is plus or minus 3 percent, so the split between all women was probably close to 50-50.

The Clinton Administration, as it turned out, had been right. The women's rights groups could get the vote of many professional women, but the majority of white women were unwilling to back affirmative action. Spillar, Smeal, and Ireland had been unable to change their minds.

Never one to accept defeat, Spillar still insisted they had been right. The campaign's tactics, she argued, had been too little too late. "I wish that women had been included all along, and instead we were treated as an add-on or an afterthought," Spillar said. "There was a tone that somehow the attempts to get the debate on gender was just a tactical decision to offset the race issue, and that was never the intention. We are impacted by what happens with affirmative action. Women had benefited significantly by affirmative action. We should not be treated as an add-on, but as an equal partner in this debate."

---